With the current state of identity theft, uncontrolled data collection and targeted marketing, there is a need for a user to protect his or her primary identity and to compartmentalize online and offline activity. For example, the user might prefer to use a primary identity for general browsing or reading online newspapers, separate from an identity for accessing and commenting on social media, separate from an identity for purchasing from e-commerce retailers, separate from an identity for online dating, and separate from an identity for selling items on an auction platform.
One method to achieve this separation (or compartmentalization) is to allow a user to create multiple personas and then use them for different purposes. A persona is a synthetic identity associated with a real user. Each persona has its own identity defined by a set of identity attributes, such as name, address, date of birth, phone, email, credit and delivery address. Each persona should be used for a limited and specific purpose, so that tracking of that identity would not form a complete picture of the real user's activity. Each persona acts as a personal privacy proxy, not allowing Internet services to access to the user's primary or real identity. In addition, each persona is completely separate so that an Internet service cannot correlate personas as belonging to the same user.
One of the key persona communication capabilities is email. Each persona typically requires a unique email address so that the user can communicate fully as the persona with that email address. The email address should be untraceable from the point of view of the user's primary identity as well as the user's other persona identities.
Protection from eavesdropping of the persona's email can be critical for some personas. For example, using a persona for political writing or opinions in regions of the world that do not respect human rights requires protection of that persona.
One technique to ensure protection of email is by employing cryptographic techniques to ensure end to end encryption of the email. End to end refers to the email messages being encrypted at the sender and decrypted at the receiver, with no cryptographic keys being stored on intermediate servers. This ensures that the only way for an adversary to get access to the unencrypted email is for them to get access to the devices where the emails are encrypted or decrypted. This is a much more difficult attack than being able to access unencrypted email during transit.
There are a number of end to end encrypted email solutions available including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Secure MIME (S/MIME). These are used when protecting email from eavesdropping is important. S/MIME has the additional advantage of being recognized as an International Standard allowing people to choose from a range of off-the-shelf email clients to communicate securely through S/MIME.
There are a number of limitations of using S/MIME or PGP email systems today that have limited their widespread update and also make them difficult to use with multiple personas. One limitation is that current email client applications are designed for a single secure email account. This means that multiple personas cannot be easily supported in these email client applications. Another limitation is that using the system is complex and requires a user to have strong technical skills. Users typically have to request certificates from certificate authorities, install them into their email client applications, they have to be able to exchange their certificates with others users, they need to know when to encrypt/sign and so on.
Thus, there is a need for an easy to use end to end encrypted email system supporting multiple personas. Ideally, such a system would be designed to be completely automated from a user's viewpoint so that they can quickly and very simply create a new persona with email address, and that persona can immediately be provided with encrypted email capability. It also desirable to facilitate an easy exchange of certificates with other users, without requiring the user to be technically proficient.